April 23, 2024   

Kshitij Goel, a Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute, was awarded the 2024 Alan J. Perlis Graduate Teaching Award by Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science (SCS) for outstanding work in redesigning and teaching Mobile Robot Algorithms Laboratory (MRAL), general excellence in teaching and student interaction, and dedication towards improving all courses in which he served as a TA.

Winners of the 2024 Alan J. Perlis Graduate Student Teaching Award have been named annually since 2005. The awards honor the graduate students who have displayed the highest degree of excellence in and dedication to teaching in SCS.

Kshitij was drawn to redesign and teach MRAL to teach students about autonomy of quadrotor aerial systems. Kshitij and his PhD advisor, Prof. Wennie Tabib, redesigned the course to provide students with a background in quadrotor control, planning, mapping, and exploration.

Professor Wennie Tabib remarked that “Kshitij’s passion for teaching is reflected in the materials he designed for the course. He spent hours carefully developing lectures, creating content, and beautiful animations to explain challenging mathematical concepts.” Through his Ph.D. dissertation, Goel is creating methods for robot path planning and mapping that adapt to environmental complexity using several tools from information theory, probabilistic machine learning, and differential geometry. During his M.S. work, he researched communication-efficient techniques for large-scale multi-robot mapping.

Prior to joining CMU as a graduate student, Kshitij earned B.Tech. (Honors) degree in Aerospace Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, where his thesis focused on the non-linear control of a severely damaged fighter aircraft for high-performance maneuvering.